Monday, October 19, 2015

The
wonder of cinema is that it’s still a wonder to us. Virtually as long as the
medium’s existed, directors have tested the limits of its storytelling
conventions, but the conventions remain intact, and so the limits continue to
be tested. Of course, like everything else, it’s more knowing now. For all his huge intellect, Jean-Luc Godard’s 60’s and
70’s experiments and meditations seem to carry a rush of pure puckish joy
that’s missing from, say, Mike Figgis’ Time
Code. One could organize quite a debating session on the proposition of
whether or not cinema should be taken seriously. Maybe, to bend a movie title,
we should view it as hopeless but not serious.

Steven Soderbergh

Steven
Soderbergh, I mentioned the other week, works at a startling pace. In the last
five years he’s released Out of Sight,
The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic (for which he won an Oscar) and Ocean’s Eleven. That’s an impressive
line-up in such a short time, although it’s not easy to determine Soderbergh’s
creative personality from it. He makes vivid, lively films, full of incident,
attuned to their settings, and ably showcasing their actors. That may seem like
superficial praise, but maybe not, for Soderbergh’s interest in surfaces may be
worth just about any other director’s interest in depth.

Erin Brockovich is one of the most skillful star vehicles in
memory, and looks as though everything else in it was calibrated for the sole
purpose of showcasing Julia Roberts. Ocean’s
Eleven had no discernible purpose other than bringing together an eclectic
bunch of big name actors (the scene at the end, where the camera pans across
most of the cast standing contentedly in a row looking over Vegas, seems to me
to sum it up). The film clearly does not “work” as satisfying rounded
entertainment, but the project has a sense of itself that almost fuels you.

His new
film Full Frontal is intended as a
quick, low-budget diversion from this run of success (and it precedes his
big-budget science fiction film Solaris,
due out in November). It has another amazing cast. Roberts plays a magazine
writer carrying out an extended interview with up-and-coming actor Blair
Underwood. Or rather, that’s what happens in a film within the film; they
actually play actors. He’s having an affair with a frustrated executive
(Catherine Keener) whose marriage to magazine journalist David Hyde-Pierce is
breaking down. Keener’s sister is a massage therapist (Mary McCormack) who has
an unsatisfying encounter with a film producer (David Duchovny) while pursuing
a cyber-romance with a theater director (Enrico Colantoni) who’s directing a
bizarre production about young Hitler starring an egotistical actor (Nicky
Katt).

Attempts to connect

Soderbergh
says his movies aren’t about surfaces, but rather about our attempts to connect
(I have a feeling that lots of directors give something like this as a standard
answer). You can see this for sure in his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, but since then the theme is only evident
in glimpses. Full Frontal embraces it
more fully – almost every scene depicts some kind of failure to engage; whether
intellectual, emotional, spiritual or artistic. But this seems like an
inevitable result of a movie that thrives on chaos, that feels as though it set
its characters in almost random motion and then sat back to see what would
happen.

That
lackadaisical quality is central to Soderbergh’s intent here. He says: “You
look at that Godard period of ’59 to ’67, and you admire his ability to sketch.
And I think you can get too caught up in this idea that every movie you make
has to be a mural. And I really felt like I’d been doing that, and I felt like
I needed to afford myself the opportunity to sketch – where things aren’t, you
know, so weighted by expectation or budget. It’s not that I view the movie as
incidental. It’s just I liked the idea of having the freedom to write with the
camera, in a way. And in an environment that seems safe, because of the scale
of the project and the way it would be made. It’s a fun way to work; it’s an
interesting way to work. It’s sort of an irresponsible way to work if you’re
doing a movie on any other scale than this.”

Maureen
Dowd in The New York Times dismissed
the movie this way: “Just because something is grainy doesn’t mean it’s cooler.
Just because it’s shot in 18 days with a hand-held camera that cost $4,000
doesn’t mean it’s more creative. Just because it’s a neo-Godardian
deconstruction of cinematic reality doesn’t mean it’s more interesting. And
just because it has an erotic title doesn’t mean it’s sexy.” All of which is
self-evident (and to digress slightly, just because Dowd’s column has a hot
reputation and a Pulitzer Price doesn’t mean it’s always good either). But there’s little evidence that
Soderbergh believes any of these straw-man assertions. His faith seems more
elemental than that. He believes in the inherent fascination of cinema – that raw
ingredients need be subject only to the simplest of recipes to produce
something sustaining. Depending how you look at it, this may either be a low or
a high expectation of the audience.

Cinematic meaning

Most
critics find Full Frontal confusing
and arid. But the film is stuffed with intriguing scenes of conflicting
expectations, self-delusion, lifestyle corrections and compromises. Sometimes
it attempts to tap genuine emotion and frustration; sometimes it just plays at
it. In general, the moments when it’s explicitly about filmmaking seem to me
its least successful in that they only allow narrow readings. The rest of the
movie is wildly discursive and evasive – the absurdity of the Hitler play
rehearsals; some low comedy involving a dog overdosing on hash brownies;
one-liners galore.

On a
couple of occasions, Terence Stamp’s character from The Limey wanders through the movie – the intention being apparently
to suggest that the action in both films takes place side by side. Which
succeeds in suggesting the immense fluidity of cinema; how it takes only a
brief allusion or connection to open up a whole new world of cinematic meaning.
The problem is that this can easily become a process of mere recognition – you make
the connection, and where does that leave you? It’s as if we’re expected to be
excited by the fact that a guy can form sentences, regardless that they don’t
tell us anything interesting. We’ve all seen so many films that we think we’re
way beyond that. And yet those who know cinema best – Soderbergh, Godard,
Figgis – are often the most fascinated by the raw material. Personally, I don’t
think the rest of us know as much as we think. Could Full Frontal possibly be ahead of its time?

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Given my
obvious enthusiasm for movies, it’s often been surprising to people that I
haven’t built up an extensive video collection. Fact is, I never saw the point
– there’s always too much new stuff to watch. Initially, I approached DVDs in
the same way. But I’m gradually breaking down. Since I bought a DVD player
about a year and a half ago, I’ve built up a collection of 43 years. I know
this is peanuts by the standards of hardcore library builders – but since I
never meant to buy any at all, it seems like a lot to me.

The first
DVD I purchased was Jean Renoir’s Grand
Illusion. I kept reading about the Criterion Collection and its pristine
restorations and fascinating extras, and it had been a long time since I’d seen
Grand Illusion, so I bought it as an
experiment. Shortly after that, I bought Eyes
Wide Shut, tempted by some kind of $10-off deal. I didn’t even think I
liked Eyes Wide Shut, but I had a
feeling it would repay further study (as it did). Soon after that, my wife gave
me a Kubrick boxed set for Christmas. I’ve written before about how this opened
my eyes to a director about whom I’d generally been lukewarm.

Taking inventory

Since
then the collection has evolved in an idiosyncratic way that doesn’t yet
represent the breadth of my taste, although it’s getting there. In addition to
eight films by Stanley Kubrick, the 43 films contain three Cocteau, three
Dreyer, four Rivette, two Bertolucci, two Herzog and two Spike Lee. It has a
number of staples – Welles’ Citizen Kane,
Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part One (haven’t
got round to Part Two yet), Demy’s Umbrellas
of Cherbourg, Tati’s Playtime,
Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. With time there will
surely be more than one Hawks (Rio Bravo),
one Antonioni (L’Avventura) and one
Hitchcock (The Birds). And I can’t
imagine going too long without acquiring some Bresson, Cassavetes, and –
unfortunately – all too many others.

Some of
my favourite contemporary American films are in there too – Magnolia, Heat, Nashville. And I bought
George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, of
which I had excellent twenty-year-old memories – fully confirmed on rewatching.
There’s also one film I wish I didn’t have – Lewis Teague’s Cujo. This was given to me as a gift,
and I have no idea why. I think maybe the people saw The Shining on my DVD shelf and figured I was a Stephen King fan.
I’m not saying Cujo is an altogether bad movie, but when I look at my
alphabetized DVD shelf, casting my eye lovingly across the titles, it stands
out as grotesquely as a porno flick. I’d like to move it to a different shelf,
but that seems silly, so it just stays there.

None of
this means that my original hypothesis was false. I’m still too occupied
watching new stuff. Here’s the shameful statistic – as of today, I haven’t yet
watched 12 out of the 43 disks. And there’s not a single one that I’ve watched
twice. I’m confident that I’ll remedy this…but then I’ll probably buy more
disks as well and the backlog will just accumulate. And how often would you
need to watch a disk to really justify the economic investment – four, five
times? This is exactly the kind of logic that successfully dissuaded me from
buying videos. But it doesn’t seem as off-putting for disks.

Where’s the Pasolini?

That’s
partly a feeling, based on analogizing to my experience with music cassettes
versus CDs, that the videos would merely have crumbled slowly to dust on the
shelf whereas the DVDs will last to the end of time. The visual appeal of the
disks themselves and of their packaging undoubtedly helps. But I fear the sad
truth is that having taken the first step, I just can’t stop now. If I never
bought another DVD, the arbitrary point at which I cut off my collection would
always gnaw at me. I mean, I’ve at least got to have Ugetsu Monogatari in there. And how can I have The Birds and not Vertigo.
And shouldn’t there be at least one Godard, one Pasolini (we named our dog
after him for Pete’s sake), one Fassbinder? And wouldn’t it be great to have a
pristine version of The Band Wagon?
At this point, getting to 100 films will be a cinch.

My
impression is that much of the non-mainstream material available on DVD was
never available on video, although I never really looked. I’ve written before
at my amazement that the Rivette material is available. His are almost the only
DVDs that I bought without previously having seen the films – I’d never had the
opportunity to watch Joan of Arc or The Gang of Four or Secret Defense. After chasing down Rivette movies for years, it’s a
huge thrill to me to have those titles just sitting at home, to watch whenever
I like. I’d love to watch all those films again right now, if I didn’t have all
this other stuff to catch up on.

My DVD
collection has reinforced one thing I already knew about myself – it really is
about the joy of watching the movie. I don’t think I’ve tapped even 2% of the
bonus materials contained on these disks. I’ve listened to not one second of
the voice-over commentaries. I’ve watched a few trailers, some deleted scenes
(most interestingly on the Bamboozled
disk), some oddities like Tippi Hedren’s screen test on The Birds disk. But this stuff quickly bores me. I guess I’ve never
felt time was best spent in getting to know a particular movie in minute
detail, when instead you could be exploring the uncharted area of a whole new
film.

Staying at home

So what
does this all mean? Well, I’ve always thought that the intangible nature of
movie watching makes it slightly dissatisfying as a hobby. All you have is the
memory. I think that’s why movie fans often seem to be into list-making, and
maintaining scrapbooks, and otherwise giving their ethereal experiences some
solid existence. Having a video or DVD collection fits right in with that, and
now I’m there with all the other movie geeks. Secondly, if I’m ever banished to
a desert island with nothing but a TV and a DVD player, I’m well on the way to
making the sentence a little more palatable. And thirdly, I may yet live up to
the possibilities of the investment I’ve made in my DVD shelf. The week I write
this, eight new movies open in Toronto. I’m only going to one of them. Given
how I just got this new disk of Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast, I don’t have the time…

(November
2015 update – well, that’s even more of a nostalgia read than usual. It all
exploded from there: for example, I ended up with fifteen Ozu films, twenty-one
Godards, and so forth. But then it died down, and I’ve hardly added to the
collection at all in the past few years. Things moved on
again!)

Monday, October 12, 2015

Well into
the new film Tadpole, the 15-year-old
protagonist makes a move on his 40-something stepmother, played by Sigourney
Weaver. When I saw the film, a man in the audience who’d so far been sitting
quietly exploded in disgust: “Filthy pervert,” he spat out. Well, everyone has
to draw the line somewhere, but that seemed to me a fairly arbitrary place to
do it. Remember how Woody Allen answered the question of whether sex is dirty
by saying it is if you do it right. Tadpole
doesn’t seem very dirty, which in this case is a sign it’s not doing it right (with
due apologies to the sensibility of the offended gentleman, whom I assume would
dissent from this view).

Tadpole

It’s an
American movie, set in New York’s Upper East Side, but it seems to wish it were
French. The 15-year-old (nicely played by Aaron Sanford) is a Voltaire buff who
speaks French whenever circumstances allow, and the approach of a civilized,
quizzical attitude to mildly transgressive material evokes French directors
like Truffaut and Malle.

A couple
of days before I saw Tadpole, I was
watching Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee
at the Cinematheque – another film in which a middle-aged protagonist flirts with
a teenager. I guess you could call that character a filthy pervert too, but
Rohmer’s always been excellent at allowing his characters’ delusions about
themselves to condition the audience’s sense of them. Anyway, nothing much
happens in Rohmer’s film, physically speaking, and I doubt that many would
think it dirty, but it’s quintessentially French. Tadpole’s instincts are a little broader and coarser than Rohmer’s
(aren’t everyone’s?), but I think in many ways director Gary Winick would be
delighted if his movie left the same kind of after-effect.

On the
other hand, I recall that in Arthur Penn’s Night
Moves, Rohmer was the recipient of Gene Hackman’s put-down about how
watching his films is like watching paint dry. Delicacy is a tricky business. Tadpole lasts only 77 minutes – short enough
to threaten its very commercial viability. Even at that length, the movie seems
rather repetitive and occasionally strained. It does convey a certain
intellectual prowess, but whereas in Rohmer’s movies the erudition is seeped
into the celluloid, in Tadpole it
seems like something pasted on. For example, the film contains “chapter
headings,” taken mostly if not entirely from Voltaire I think, along the lines
of: “Reason consists of always seeing things as they are,” and “If we don’t
find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.” These all seemed
to me either too obvious or else completely inscrutable.

Most
puzzling of all, the movie has no ending. In Claire’s Knee, the ending serves as proof of Rohmer’s discernment. Tadpole reaches its inevitable decision
point, and then fizzles completely. I said Tadpole
doesn’t seem very dirty, but there’s one exception – the title itself – with its
vague connotations of reproductive biology and vague double-entendre.
Ultimately though, it’s the word’s squelchy immaturity that seems most
relevant.

I should
say that the movie seems American in one way at least – the vague sense of Wes
Anderson around the edges. I’m gradually concluding that the director of Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums is the most influential figure of his generation.
At one point Sanford, finding out that Elvis had a teenage Elvis crush, makes
himself a pair of fake sideburns out of dog hair. There’s a deadpan incongruity
to the incident that seems inescapably Andersonian now.

Never Again

I didn’t mean to suggest by the way that dirty
equals good, although I do have a sneaking affection for the Carry On series (Benny Hill never did
much for me though). If that were in doubt, there’s a bizarre new project called
Never Again, which filters some of
the raunchiest material in memory through the medium of…uh…esteemed actress
Jill Clayburgh. In particular, she has one extended scene with a sex toy that…well,
you’d have to see it for yourself. Or rather, you should take my word for it
that you don’t need to see it for
yourself.

Clayburgh
plays a 54-year-old divorcee who hasn’t had sex in a decade and is desperate to
turn that around. Jeffrey Tambor is a guy in the same boat, on such a sexual
losing streak that he thinks he might be homosexual. They meet at a gay bar,
start having hot sex while insisting they’ll avoid love. But hey, it ain’t so
easy.

I swear I
don’t have anything against 54-year-old people having sex (I hope to be in that
situation myself one day). And Never
Again’s unabashed randiness is a distinct improvement over the dreary
pseudo-philosophizing of the recent vastly overpraised Innocence. But the movie feels fake and artificial, stuffed with
elements you could basically have ticked off a checklist (Clayburgh’s
college-age daughter catching them in the act; the life-threatening accident
that befalls one of the two; the background chatter of Clayburgh’s like-minded
group of friends). Although Michael McKean’s performance as a transsexual prostitute
is beyond anyone’s imagination, even after you’ve seen it.

The film
seems to think itself brave and daring, but that’s just another way of being
evasive. It never shows us what the relationship consists of – we get the ups
and downs and the sex, but none of the necessary stuff in between. And it has
an extremely programmatic view of human relationships; would anyone analyze
himself as being gay if he didn’t feel it? Maybe in your 50s you lose touch
with yourself more than I can currently anticipate. Tambor is only marginally
persuasive, but Clayburgh actually turns in a fine performance. Which in the
circumstances may be even more impressive than her achievement in An Unmarried Woman.

Intimacy

Last
year, there was a fair bit of hubbub about a film called Intimacy, which supposedly represents a step forward in
straightforwardly depicting adult sexuality. I say supposedly because I haven’t
seen it – it wasn’t at last year’s festival and it hasn’t opened commercially
here. Apparently no distributor was interested in it (the video/DVD release
must be imminent). I don’t want to over-analyze one economic decision, but it
seems that English-language movies are still doing everything possible with the
subject of sex, except staring at it straight on.

Foreign
movies avoid this – take for example the recent Israeli film Late Marriage. But on the whole, whether
you’re 15 and doing it with a 40-year-old or whether you’re a hot-blooded
54-year-old doing it with a contemporary, you’re not likely to find much of a
mirror in the movies. However, if you’re a 54-year-old male who’s had some work
done, doing it with a 25-year-old model in a soft-focus world….

Monday, October 5, 2015

Although
I couldn’t make the slightest guess about the recipients of next year’s Oscars,
I think I already know what the year’s most overrated film will be. Not that
everyone’s fallen for Sam Mendes’ Road to
Perdition. Stephanie Zacharek’s review on Salon.com, for instance, could
hardly have been more disinterested (“Over and over again, Mendes confuses
gracefulness with tastefulness: He loads up on the latter, not realizing that a
great movie is a kind of dance, not a perfectly executed dinner party”). But
the consensus is that the film is a major event, a front runner for next year’s
awards, an example of Hollywood craftsmanship at its finest.

Oscars beget Oscars

This
partly tells us that Oscars are expected to beget Oscars – Mendes won for his
debut film American Beauty, and Perdition has two former Best Actors –
Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. I dealt with American
Beauty in this space at the time of the 1999 film festival, where it won
the people’s choice award. I wrote a complimentary review of it, which with
hindsight was a bit of an autopilot job – the pace of the festival gets to you
after a while. But I didn’t list it among my favourite films of the festival,
and I was never sure I really understood what was so hot about it. I meant to
go back a second time and reconsider, but it’s never seemed like a good enough
use of two hours. Since then, the film’s dwindled in my memory.

I’m sure
about Road to Perdition though – sure
that it’s a good looking package with nothing inside. For sure, it’s “well
made” in the way we understand that term: you feel that everyone involved went
about their business as though repainting the Sistine Chapel. The problem is in
the inherent quality of the material. Road
to Perdition is thin, trashy stuff, but belaboring under the notion that
it’s floating free of the pulp in which it was born, that artistry and
sensitivity have provided it a cushion of air.

Hanks
(who’s duller here than he’s ever been) plays a hired gun for crime boss Newman
(effortlessly charismatic, just as I’m sure he is when fast asleep). Hanks
hides his occupation beneath a respectable wife-and-two-children veneer
(Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the wife, wasted in a bizarrely blank role,
although her casting suggests a personal history wilder than anything the movie
wants to explore). Curious about his father’s occupation, the oldest kid hides
in the back of the car one night and witnesses a hit. Hanks assures Newman
there’s nothing to fear, but Newman’s son doesn’t trust him, and shoots dead
Leigh and the youngest boy. Hanks and the surviving kid take off, pursued by
the mob.

With integrity

From then
on it’s an odyssey of narrow escapes, double-crosses and showdowns. The film’s
claim to significance lies in two intertwined strands. First, this supposedly
isn’t a film that glorifies violence or uses it unthinkingly – rather, it’s a
film that understands violence and its effect on those that commit it. A recent
dubiously kiss-ass New York Times
profile of Mendes summed this up as such: “Mendes cast Tom Hanks against type
as a gangster, but he is a bad guy on a heroic mission to avenge his wife and
child’s murder, and his acts of violence are understandable. He is a religious
man, and his acts of killing carry the weight of sin. This makes him
sympathetic and allows Mendes to approach the theme of violence with
integrity.”

Ah,
integrity. I read that sentence several times, wondering what it means, before
concluding it means next to nothing. David Edelstein in Slate dismissed the film, evoking Charles Bronson and calling it “a
by-the-numbers vigilante flick that comes with a handy anti-violence message –
delivered with perfect timing, after the bad guys have been blown away.” That
seems right to me.

But the
movie is unusually restrained about rubbing our noses in gore – the killings
mostly happen off-screen. In the closing stretch, the voice-over tells us that
Hanks’ driving ambition has been to save his son from such an intimate
relationship with death. The staging of the final scenes is deliberately
otherworldly, as though the characters had slipped to an anteroom of the next
life to await Judgment. But gimme a break. We’ve already had a vastly
disproportionate number of would-be serious movies about hit men, each of which
comes packaged with some dutiful soundbites from its director about how (unlike
all those other hit men movies) it
digs deeper, revealing a chiller truth that evaded us among the gleeful
massacres of its predecessors.

Mendes
may deserve some meagre credit for avoiding bloodshed, but it only makes his
movie look like something that’s been pre-edited for airline viewing. At the
end of the day, this is the same old crap that Hollywood’s been peddling for
seventy years, and it would have taken more than an unusually tasteful lighting
design to hide that.

Fatherhood

The
film’s second claim to significance lies in its musings on fatherhood. Here’s The New York Times again: “Though death
pervades Perdition, the mounting tragedies
have an oddly salutary effect; aligned against common enemies, Hanks and his
son are drawn closer together. It’s a brilliant stroke of audience
manipulation. ‘This is a very forgiving movie toward fathers,” Mendes admits. ‘As
a child, I never really felt I knew my father. His life was a secret to me. It’s
no coincidence that Road to Perdition
is about a son who’s brought close to his father when he finds out the secret
about him.’”

And Hanks
is Newman’s symbolic son, and must build a relationship with his own son, who
in terms of emotional intelligence may be the real father, and you can stir in
more of the same. But this is all even more trivial than the film’s commentary
on violence. The movie sets out the theme (for example, in a scene of Hanks and
Newman wordlessly playing a piano duet together) but can’t make us feel it. Its
stately rhythm denies human truth at every turn. There’s no time to feel the
grief at the death of the wife and younger brother, no time to explore the
depth of the boy’s guilt. Even the supposed key element – the growing relationship
between Hanks and the kid – remains opaque.

I’ve been
quoting here from the negative reviews, but there are plenty of positive ones
to offset them. As I say, Road to
Perdition has a handsome surface. But to quote the tagline from American Beauty: Look closer.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Unless
you’re Steven Soderbergh, who seems to work at a pace unknown to Hollywood
since the 1930’s heyday of “One Take Woody” Van Dyke, well over a year passes
from when a movie starts shooting to when it hits the screen. How many times
has it been pointed out to us recently, in mitigation of potential allegations
of tastelessness, that a particular release (Bad Company, Big Trouble, Collateral Damage, The Sum of all Fears)
was filmed pre-September 11 (back
when, of course, bad taste and exploitation used to be OK)? With that in mind,
here are two current releases that may only seem
to have their fingers on a current pulse.

Minority Report

Steven
Spielberg’s second attempt to make a more adult summer sci-fi blockbuster
clearly works better than AI did. The
movie has pace and consistency and barely puts a foot wrong, dramatically
speaking. Tom Cruise plays a cop in Washington of 2054, a star of the feted
“Pre-Crime” unit. Aided by three young adults with pre-cognitive powers,
Pre-Crime detects crimes before they happen, prevents them, and places the
would-be perpetrators in suspended animation. This is so successful that as the
movie opens, Washington hasn’t had a single murder in six years, but ethical
and moral qualms hold up national acceptance of the program.

The
movie’s intellectual heights come very early on, as it debates the pre-crime
program’s religious undertones (the set design rather overplays this parallel),
and mulls over the ethics of putting people away when they haven’t actually
done anything (what if the pre-cogs made a mistake?). Reviewers have noted the
affinity with current debates over profiling and detention of terrorist
suspects and other post-September 11 civil liberties issues. This is why I call
the film lucky on the timing.

But it
quickly leaves reflection behind. Cruise steps up one day to the next murder,
36 hours in the future, and finds himself fingered as the killer. Convinced of
his own innocence and suspecting a frame-up, he goes on the run. The movie is a
superb chase thriller, with enormous fluidity and imagination. The attention to
detail is awesome, fully reminding you of Spielberg’s expansive talent. He
supposedly convened a seminar of experts in various fields, probing in detail
where the next fifty years might take us in various areas. Truth be told
though, the end results of this research are a little confusing. Clothes, home
furnishings and general attitudes are only slightly different from the present
day, whereas transportation and all the technology attending the Pre-Crime
program seem transformed beyond recognition. A Kubrick would have persuaded us
of what we’re looking at, but Minority
Report leaves it feeling a bit arbitrary.

Creative Struggle

It’s also
disappointing that the film becomes more and more a conventional conspiracy
thriller. Ultimately the ulterior motives of a conventional villain crowd out
any more serious consideration of issues. True, the narrative retains a
fluidity and imagination that’s on another dimension from normal thriller
plotting. And the movie is crammed with surprises – a wonderfully sleazy
sequence with a decrepit eye doctor, casual glimpses of highly convincing bits
of future technology (like advertising posters that, operating via retina
recognition, address you by name as you walk past), fine acting all around.

Not for
the first time though, Spielberg’s immense facility threatens to smother his
characters. That might not have been inappropriate for a future in which
individuality is suspect. And yet, the film ends with an affirmation of the
family, of fatherhood, of human connection. The film seems to be trying to
flesh out Cruise’s character, but the motivations provided to him are so
prosaic that he remains blandly functional.

In a
certain way, the messiness (if not occasional sheer lunacy) of AI (on top of all the pre-release hype
about Stanley Kubrick’s influence) made it more interesting than Minority Report to think about
afterwards. AI’s episodic, bumpy
structure at least seemed to allude to some kind of creative struggle, whereas Minority Report feels like it comes too
easily. There’s a sequence in which Cruise steers a captured pre-cog through
the mall, and with second sight spilling from her in all directions, she
brilliantly steers him away from his pursuers. The choreography is wonderful,
but it’s a very abstract kind of dance – so casual that it almost alienates
you. But maybe it’s best that the film lives on the surface of things, given
what it tells us of the dangers of digging beneath them.

Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

The
second film is Dangerous Lives of Altar
Boys, and I assume the title provides enough explanation of why this movie
could be considered topical. The film follows two teenage boys attending a
Catholic school, where they channel their cynicism about the institution and
the dogma into generating a lurid comic book – the pinched-faced nun/teacher
played by Jodie Foster is transformed into a motorbike-riding “Nunzilla.” The
film presents this imagined alternative world in splashy animated sequences
that break up and vaguely parallel the live-action story.

One of
the boys works on dramatic diversions from humdrum life such as cutting down
telegraph polls, stealing a statue of the school’s patron saint, and kidnapping
a cougar from a local zoo. The other falls tentatively in love with a girl
whose problems run deeper than his shallow sense of victimhood can comprehend.
A lot of it is familiar stuff for sure. But this film yields many surprises
too. Foster’s character seems shallow and under-written for a while, but you
slowly realize the depth of her belief and her accompanying agonies. Jena
Malone, as the girl, is sublimely complex. And the film has a shocking climax,
even if the few epilogue scenes water down the closing impression too much.

As for
the much-documented dangerous lives of real altar boys, the film isn’t at all
about corrupt priests. It actually only has one priest, an easy-going
chain-smoking Vincent D’Onofrio. For a while you wonder whether his
conviviality will be revealed as a sick sham, but it’s comforting that it isn’t.
He’s just a guy with some colour round the edges. The film doesn’t talk at all
about priestly scandals – actually, the title is more lurid than the film
deserves. The cartoon sequences definitely mix things up a bit, but are
basically pretty expendable. The impact of the film is in its quieter moments,
even if you rather doubt that the movie itself quite appreciates this. This is
a bit of a minority report, critically speaking, but I found Dangerous Lives more stimulating and
thought-provoking than Spielberg’s film.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).